Epitaph for a Congress
EDITORIAL Epitaph for a Congress Perhaps the Democratic sweep in last November’s elections was providential. Consider what might have happened if Republicans had suffered setbacks on November...
...Whenever you think congressional Democrats can sink no lower, they prove you wrong...
...That is, contrary to all evidence, Clinton accused the commanding general of U.S...
...But fi rst, on Thursday, they had to try to override President Bush’s veto of their cherished middleclass children’s insurance bill...
...Those pushing for a new strategy in Iraq and a surge of troops might well have failed to convince the administration to embrace such a radical change...
...They failed...
...The most comical evidence of the surge’s success was the story on the antiwar McClatchy Newspapers wire last Tuesday, “As violence falls in Iraq, cemetery workers feel the pinch...
...Twenty-four hours later, Democratic leaders had yet to chastise their 18-term colleague...
...But you’re going to spend it to blow up innocent people, if we can get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the president’s amusement...
...It’s the congressional Democrats who are the losers...
...The political situation facing the Bush administration would have seemed less dire...
...troops in Iraq are just “blow[ing] up innocent people,” and the president is sending those troops there “to get their heads blown off” for his “amusement...
...He was able to buy time until the new strategy backed by more troops began to work...
...A loss of income for cemetery workers due to a decline in violence...
...Bush would have had a diffi cult time resisting pressure from a Republican or partly Republican Congress...
...And we would now be facing an utter debacle in the heart of the Middle East...
...Now it looks as if the war, despite the Democratic Congress’s best efforts, may well be won...
...But last month, over on the Senate side, she couldn’t resist impugning the integrity of General David Petraeus as he testifi ed to the Senate Armed Services Committee...
...Jay Price of the Raleigh News & Observer and Qasim Zein of McClatchy Newspapers (along with McClatchy special correspondents Janab Hussein, Hussein Kadhim, and Sahar Issa—it was a major story...
...reported the sad news: At what’s believed to be the world’s largest cemetery, where Shiite Muslims aspire to be buried and millions already have been, business isn’t good...
...The report of the Iraq Study Group would have fallen on the desperately receptive ears of congressional Republicans (“we barely held on and we’d better do something”) and on equally receptive disappointed-butemboldenedDemocratic ones...
...Consider what might have happened if Republicans had suffered setbacks on November 7, 2006, but had narrowly maintained control of Congress...
...Having little left to lose, Bush defi ed conventional wisdom, changed commanders and strategy, and went for the surge...
...The Democrats engaged in endless efforts to make sure the war really was lost...
...So does Hillary Clinton...
...troops in Iraq of misleading the American people...
...So U.S...
...And so could be the 2008 Democratic presidential nominee...
...He was able to hold Republicans together and beat back a series of partisan assaults from the Democratic Congress, starting in January and continuing into September...
...History may well record that statement as the epitaph for the 110th Congress, and the party that led it...
...Stark refused to apologize, but he did say he respected the troops...
...All of this followed by several months the defi ning statement of the 110th Congress: Harry Reid’s assertion, this past April 19, “This war is lost...
...A drop in violence around Iraq has cut burials in the huge Wadi al Salam cemetery here by at least one-third in the past six months, and that’s cut the pay of thousands of workers who make their living digging graves, washing corpses or selling burial shrouds...
...Bush’s veto was about to be sustained when senior Democratic congressman Pete Stark, from the San Francisco Bay area, took to the fl oor of the House: You don’t have money to fund the war or children...
...Shaky Republicans in Congress, terrifi ed by the close call, would have been adamant that we begin to draw down in Iraq...
...Clearly an injustice for the Democratic Congress to address...
...Clinton said Petraeus’s testimony required a “willing suspension of disbelief...
...The 110th Congress would then have insisted, with a bipartisan fl ourish, on an establishmentsanctioned middle way that was, in fact, a disguised path to defeat...
...Are the American people likely to elect the candidate of a party that has tried its best to lose a winnable war...
...William Kristo...
...Instead, the GOP lost both houses...
...As the astute observers at the Powerline blog put it, “This is one of those headlines you couldn’t make up...
Vol. 13 • October 2007 • No. 7
